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VANCOUVER -- A stunned Guobin Li arrived back at his single-room occupancy hotel to find it blocked off by police tape, a fire engine nearby and a throng of reporters asking him how it felt to be left homeless as a building next door threatened to collapse onto the 122-year-old structure in the heart of Vancouver’s old Japantown.

The 65-year-old was the last of about 12 elderly residents to be evacuated from 439 Powell St. Wednesday evening after authorities were alerted that morning to structural problems at the neighbouring 451 Powell St., an abandoned building owned by the Philippine Women’s Centre. Firefighters said the interior wall of the collapsing building appeared to be buckling and that the structure of the second floor is extremely unsound.

Li, who speaks only a smattering of English, returned briefly to the room he has shared with his wife for the past eight years to gather some belongings before moving into a motel on Kingsway paid for by Emergency Social Services.

The residents, many of whom are Chinese-Canadian seniors, must now wait until city crews demolish the neighbouring building, which may be full of asbestos-laced dust, and investigate the safety of their SRO.

“I think most of them are shocked — uprooting them and moving them is just not something you want to do,” said Deputy Fire Chief Steve Laleune Wednesday night. “But for their safety, it’s something that we have to do.

“They were wonderful people, they’re salt of the earth.”

The demolition was planned for Wednesday night, but power and trolley lines as well as a 10-metre Crimean Linden tree had to be cut in front of the building. Around 9:30 p.m. Laleune said crews would most likely wait until this morning for the excavator to bring down the three-storey building, which was last occupied in 2010.

It passed a city building inspection that same year and hasn’t had one since it was abandoned, Laleune said.

Inspections are normally triggered by a building permit application or a complaint. However, the neighbouring building, like every SRO in Vancouver, undergoes an inspection annually, and passed its latest, according to Laleune.

The condemned building was in the process of being sold to Tom Chow, owner of Double Happiness Foods, a noodle factory a few doors down. Chow said he discovered on July 15, while preparing to move into the building he hoped to use as an office and storage space, that an interior wall had collapsed. He said he was worried about the entire structure collapsing and told the owners to alert their insurance company and the City of Vancouver.

When nothing happened, he alerted city engineers and Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services on Wednesday morning.

“I believe [in] safety first,” he said.

Onlookers in Oppenheimer Park said they heard the building shift Wednesday morning with a crunching noise.

The strip of Powell Street, nicknamed Japantown, is home to some of the oldest buildings in Vancouver as well as the city’s original Japanese community, which established there after the fire that destroyed much of Vancouver in 1886.

The condemned building was built in 1907 in front of a separate tenement house on the same lot that had been built eight years earlier, according to a historical review prepared for the city by Birmingham & Wood Architects and Planners.

Named the Yamagishi Building after its Japanese owners, it had been home to a family owned barber shop for 30 years before gradually falling “into serious disrepair,” according to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s executive director Diane Switzer.

The block the two buildings sit on is an important piece of Japanese-Canadian history, Switzer said.

“It’s disappointing when these buildings are allowed to languish in disrepair because then things like what happened today take place,” she said. “It’s an owner’s responsibility to maintain their own buildings.

“It’s demolition by neglect.”

She added that you can’t “tar a whole neighbourhood with one brush.”

“There’s some amazing buildings that are right on Powell Street there that have exciting programming taking place, wonderful small, single-room accommodation that is clean and bright,” Switzer said. “So no, I don’t think you can come in and say ‘the whole neighbourhood needs a serious inspection.’”

Battalion Chief Steve Chila said the SRO suite bordering the condemned building may be pulled down as well once the demolition team knocks down the adjoining brick wall.

“It might take part of the floor down and make it unoccupiable,” Chila said Wednesday evening. “They’re holding each other up, they’re so old.”

His colleague Laleune said that the SRO — which was originally a rooming house for Europeans before housing Japanese workers — was likely made of sturdy timbers that will remain standing, even if the facade of the building may be damaged by the nearby demolition.

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